Does B.C. Cabinet Corruption Continue

Well, if there's one thing we can count on, it's Robin Mathews to have a new-jerk reaction to anything that involves Americans.

Well, if there's one thing we can count on, it's Individualist to have a new-jerk(?) reaction to anything Robin Mathews.

Well, I did step into that one. Nicely played, nonetheless. Yes, I must admit that I find Robin's facile anti-Americanism annoying. Mathews bugs me in a way that Laxer, Watkins, Hurtig, Barlow and Orchard don't. Unlike those others, Mathews really seems to have something against Americans as a people and as individuals.

Having just come back from the States, I can sympathize with Robin. That's not to say that I'm taking a "holier than thou" stance, but the "milk of human kindness" has definitely curdled in that fair country.

Let me put it another way. I have some major problems with Scandinavian social democracy, particularly its cultural basis in Jante Law anti-individualism. But I'd have no problem with a federal or provincial government hiring a Swede or Norwegian for a post like the one mentioned in this article.

To suggest that a person should not be hired simply because of their nationality, well how can that not be considered bigotry? Would Robin have had a problem with a European being hired? Or someone from Latin America? I'd still disagree with a protectionist/nationalist stance that excluded all foreigners, but at least it would be more defensible.

Out here on the coast, the government hired a German (via the USA) who screwed up the ferry system royally.
HAHN definition:
From the Middle High German "han" or "hane" meaning cock or rooster, Hahn was originally a nickname for a proud, cocky individual.

Seems that any nationality, when screened through the filter of America, is capable of screwing up anything.......

As a Canadian nationalist and someone who strongly supports a lot of the principles of Red Toryism, I think that there's been a serious problem with the way my fellow nationalists like Hurtig, Orchard et al. have been commmunicating over the last several years.

Most of us are familiar with Hurtig referring to people who support closer ties with the U.S. as "sellouts", "traitors", "compradors", etc. Similarly, on this site we've had Robin Mathews compare Stephen Harper to Adolf Hitler and refer to Harper as a "psychopath". With that kind of rhetoric, I can only imagine how many potential allies they've turned off, or otherwise dismiss them as cranks. How do they, especially Mathews, expect anyone to take them seriously, much less listen to what they have to say, if those are the statements they're making?!?

Too often, the valuable points people like Hurtig and Orchard are trying to make end up getting lost in the negativity they spew. As Hurtig has pointed out, the results of all the tax cuts and foreign takeovers we've seen in Canada over the past 10-15 years have been extremely mixed, at best, while Orchard illustrates some of the major flaws in NAFTA. These can and should be some of the main points that are worth tackling, and that most Canadians can relate to much more easily. As an Albertan, I'm aghast that my province would agree to support anything like the proportionality clause in NAFTA, while people like Peter Lougheed, Diane Francis, Rudyard Griffiths and Gordon Nixon now find themselves having the same concerns about NAFTA and foreign ownership that people like Hurtig, James Laxer and Mel Watkins have been raising for years. One could easily ask Prairie ranchers or B.C. lumberjacks about the supposed "benefits" of NAFTA when the agreement proved to be utterly ineffective in stopping the American protectionist measures. When I was at a sustainability conference in southern Alberta a few years ago, I was surprised at some of the opinions people expressed-one young woman, a sixth generation farmer who was a devoted supporter of Stephen Harper, also vehemently expressed her opposition to the idea that Canada should become more integrated with the U.S. With all the U.S.'s woes right now, we can and should be asking if it's such a good idea to even be getting too tied up with them in the first place, especially when most of these broad, sweeping trade and border agreements have been negotiated behind closed doors with little scrutiny by the public, Parliament or the American Congress.

All of these things could, in my mind, raise some major alarm bells with Canadians. In fact, in some respects they already are and the concerns cross partisan lines. However, there's a distinction between criticizing our current trade regime or the tax system, and shouting "Yankee Go Home" at every American influence that crosses into Canada. I've eaten at McDonald's dozens of times, I've shopped at Wal-Mart, I've consumed American culture like Spider-Man comics and the Simpsons cartoons, and I've formed friendships with dozens of individual Americans. To my mind, American investment in Canadians companies (as opposed to foreign takeovers of existing Canadian companies) and American companies setting up stores and factories in Canada are all perfectly welcome and can provide a lot of benefits. Nor does it mean that I think people whose views differ from mine are necessarily acting in bad faith-they just have a different view of how things should be, that's all.

In my case, it's not America in and of itself that I and I suspect most other Canadians have a problem with. Rather, it's the exceptionalism and triumphalism that some Americans have expressed over the years, as if their way of doing things is the only viable one that bother me, as well as the much harsher sink-or-swim individualism that tends to prevail down there. Canadian conservatives ranging from Preston Manning to Individualist himself, on the other hand, have expressed support for at least some kind of social safety net to help people in genuine need, a belief that remains expressed in the Conservative Party's founding principles. It might be much more limited than what Liberal or NDP supporters might prefer, but it still exists. By contrast, I have a much harder time finding a similar statement from the current crop of candidate running for the Republican nomination for the American presidency. The closest thing I can think of is Ron Paul's response to the question about people without health insurance, wherein (if I recall correctly) he said that the community can and should support those people voluntarily through charitable donations.

My response would be that individual charity and support, for all its very real value, can't provide as much support to as many people as can a combination of individual charitable support and government action through social programs, tax credits or what have you. To my mind, society has always thrived the most when individual initiative works with collective action, as each can play off each others' strengths while keeping each others' limitations and weaknesses in check. That's been the core message that people like Hurtig have tried to express-when he was profiled on this summer's edition of "Ideas" on CBC, Mel outright said that he wasn't in favour of nationalizing private companies, and alluded to the National Party having been to the right of the NDP-but it's frequently been lost in the invective. Unfortunately, as I said before that too often seems to be lost in talk about traitors and sellouts, telling the "Yankees" to go home, and in general often attacking anyone who dares to disagree. Which is sad, really, because some of the core aspects of the Red Tory narrative are still to my mind very much a part of who we are in Canada, and it continues to play an often overlooked role even in my home province of Alberta.

None of this means that I necessarily have anything against someone like Individualist who has a different opinion. He simply sees things a different way. Nor do I have anything against Americans or their country in general-whatever issues I might have with some aspects of their political culture, I have nothing but respect for their passion for progress and innovation, and the contributions that same passion has led them to make to the world's art, science and culture.

NOTE: Individualist, if you're a woman please let me know and I'll stop using the male pronouns to refer to you. I haven't seen any posts of yours where you express your gender, and I've had to use the male pronoun in its generic sense, when it refers to someone whose gender is unknown.

It's funny that you mention the nuances and variety of viewpoints within the nationalist tent, particularly when many people on the left tend to overlook those same things within the more individualist and populist conservative traditions. I have friends who are card-carrying members of the federal Conservative party and who have expressed the same reservations over the centralizing of power in the Prime Minister's Office that Lawrence Martin has been talking about, and who have the same beefs with American exceptionalism and the Iraq War that many people on the left have expressed. And then there are those conservatives like Diane Francis who've expressed the same concerns about foreign takeovers and continental integration as Mel Hurtig, an irony that isn't lost on Mel himself:

http://melhurtig.ca/2011/01/19/rip-keith-davey/

It also cuts the other way, too. Ron Dart is a close friend of Robin Mathews, and in reading his book "The Canadian High Tory Tradition" I've noted the way he takes Canadian leftists to task for simply aping the tactics and statements of prominent American leftists like Noam Chomsky.

In my case, while I greatly admire St�phane Dion for a variety of reasons, I couldn't bring myself to vote for him in 2008. For me, the Green Shift was the dealbreaker. When I was having lunch with my former graduate thesis supervisor last year and I mentioned that to him, my former supervisor was more than a little surprised and said that I'm probably more conservative than I thought. In part, that explains why I strongly support Stephen Harper's judicial reforms, particularly when Canadian judges give absurdly lenient sentences to sickos like this guy:

http://www.stalbertgazette.com/article/ ... /311309965

To me, Canadian nationalism and sovereignty aren't just about social programs and foreign ownership restrictions anyway. Those can be part of it, sure, but I also very strongly support the way the Harper Conservatives are rebuilding the Canadian military. Not only is it unfair to the Americans to expect them to foot the entire bill for defending North America, but I also like having a strong military that can stand on its own two feet. Same thing with Harper's efforts to commemorate the War of 1812 (which ties into our very proud but sadly neglected military history), his Arctic sovereignty initiative (which can itself be an important assertion of Canadian sovereignty over our northern territories), and his favouring immigrants who speak good English and/or French over those that don't (which reinforces English and French as our official languages). Whatever other issues I might have with Harper, his government has made a number of very useful bread-and-butter reforms in a number of areas where attention was long overdue, and if you ask me it's been those kinds of reforms that have gotten him his majority in Parliament.

[quote="Individualist]I'm sure Robin dislikes them too. At the very least, he wouldn't want any of them immigrating to Canada.[/quote]
I believe he hasn't addressed his remarks against anyone earning less than $200K in the US, so I couldn't say if "hates" the American poor as much......